About

We are currently in Uganda and on the move to explore East Africa.

Marloes & Vincent are two Dutchies living the life in East Africa. We left our chilly hometown Amsterdam on the evening of Friday the 13th January, 2012 – to awake the next morning in a completely different, and a lot hotter, world. We are currently living in Kampala, the very relaxed capital of Uganda.

Marloes has lived in Mali before, so she is not completely unaccustomed to this continent; while for Vincent it is actually the first time he sets foot in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Amsterdam, Museumplein, Summer 2010

On this website we shall share with you – our family, friends and everybody else who is interested – our experiences of life in East Africa. Currently we are planning to stay here for about two years, with a first stint in Uganda and a second part in Tanzania. But as the often heard catchphrase “This is Africa…” goes, nothing is for sure over here, so who knows where we will end up. Through this site we shall keep you posted on the latest developments.

Marloes will be working in the Solar Power Industry, selling so-called Solar Home Systems for a Dutch company called SolarNow. Marloes already worked for the Rural Energy Foundation in Mali, which was the predecessor of the current social enterprise SolarNow. So, she knows a thing or two about how to use Solar to transform a developing world.

Vincent is a freelance Marketing & Strategy consultant and he will be splitting his time between working for clients from back home (well, actually these were located all around the globe anyway – bless the laptop and the invention of the Internet) and by engaging in projects for local clients.

In case you are wondering about the name of our website: “Hey Mzungu!” is something you hear quite often as you walk around on the streets of East Africa. When the first white European explorers where roaming about in this part of the world during the 19th century, the Africans living here used to describe them as “aimless wanderers” or in Swahili (a Bantu language widely spoken in East Africa): ‘wazungu’ in plural or ‘mzungu’ in singular form. In other local languages this term was eventually copied, albeit in slightly different spelling sometimes. In Luganda (the language of the Baganda Kingdom in Uganda, which is the area around Kampala) it is spelled as ‘Muzungu’, with one extra ‘u’.

We hope you enjoy reading our tales as much as we do experiencing them! And, don’t forget we also are very much interested in what is happening where you are living.